


The Libra Chronicle 000 (Series Pilot): "Judgment Call"

by alex_greene



Series: The Libra Chronicle [1]
Category: Hunter: The Reckoning
Genre: Horror, The Hunt, graphic descriptions of undead, hunter: the reckoning - Freeform, imbued, onyx path publishing, origins story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 07:53:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20093860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alex_greene/pseuds/alex_greene
Summary: The origin story of the imbued hunter Gregory Malpas Stewart, who became known to the authorities as "Codename Libra." Hunter: the Reckoning fan fiction, retelling the origin story of one of Britain's imbued legends from 1999 through to the present day, currently 2019.





	The Libra Chronicle 000 (Series Pilot): "Judgment Call"

**The Libra Chronicle 000: Judgment Call, The Series Pilot**

for **Hunter: the Reckoning**

by Alex Greene

* * *

From _The Imbued Memoirs of "Codename Libra,"_ discovered on a flash drive on August 3, 2019, on a chair in St John's Food Court, Liverpool.

* * *

All the ways a life can get turned upside down - cancer diagnosis, wife announces she's pregnant, motor accident - nothing can beat "suddenly realising that monsters are real, and they are in the here and now."

Okay, then, picture the scene. It's December 3rd, 1999. It's Friday, and I'm on my way home. "Home," in this case, is Chester, in Cheshire. Nice place, back then.

It was about sixteen thirty hours, and hardly anybody I knew used military time. It was a force of habit for me, from a past I wanted to put well behind me. Single; never married; halfway to broke. But the job was doing well, and the wage I'd been picking up since September was helping me ascend slowly away from the horrors of destitution. Living in Chester, but working in Liverpool. It was a boring job, shuffling papers, marking people's CVs as rejected or accepted. People talking about automating the process, so that everyone would have to be sending their CVs as electronic documents - possibly Microsoft Word, or even this new format called PDF that could be read from something called Acrobat.

This was the compass of my life: classic pen-pushing bureaucracy, paper-shuffling. A desk job, in a small firm, where the employees sat in sterile, smoky cubicles and answered phones. Welcome to First Job Recruitment, an up-and-coming company aimed at getting unemployed people in Liverpool and Chester working. My name is Gregory Malpas Stewart. How may I help you?

Sixteen thirty nine, and it was dark and rainy. I was almost home, Ronan Keating singing "When You Say Nothing At All" on the radio, me singing my version of the chorus which was "You say it best / When you say sweet bugger all," when my fuel light began to blink. I swore I'd filled the damned thing only that morning. Just in case it wasn't a malfunction, I pulled in to the Texaco garage on the way into town, just past Bache and Chester Zoo. I usually spent a little too long chatting up Janey Mills in the petrol station, but she and I always agreed that it was simple flirtation. Light badinage, to pass the time. She wasn't into me, and truth be told I was okay with just being her friend, because she was a damned good friend.

My life was routine like this - stop at the petrol station to buy a sandwich for lunch, engage Janey in a little saucy badinage, just enough to lighten the mood - then off to work. Normally, Janey worked mornings, and it would be either dour old Frank or stroppy Jacob on the way home.

The fuel light kept blinking empty as my Vectra pulled into the Texaco. For some reason, and I thought it was a trick of the light, the sign didn't read "**TEXACO**." It read "**CHOOSE**." I blinked and looked again. It still read "**CHOOSE**."

In the stark grey light from the overhead canopy, I saw movement up ahead. A small gang of people. It looked as if they were stalking some chap in a raincoat, and the raincoat wearer was being backed up against the air pump stand.

The light from my car headlamps shone on their faces as they turned to look at me. I recognised one of them. It was Janey Mills.

And then I saw the person who was backed up against the air pump, and everything fell apart.

First of all, I realised that I wasn't looking at a person at all. Not human. Not even living. He literally looked like a corpse, dressed in the clothes he had been buried in. Missing eyes, rotting face, left hand dripping worms. An actual walking corpse.

And then I saw the corpse's stalkers. Including Janey. They looked human, all too human. I glanced back at the target backed up against the wall - still a living corpse.

There was a flicker in the light. I couldn't quite catch it at first, and I had to peer at it from the corner of the eye. Some shape, distorting the air like the special effect from that 1988 Arnie movie set in the jungle. I found myself thinking 'Cloaked?,' the word popping into my head from nowhere, like that Star Trek reboot with the space station. I knew that somewhere inside that envelope of distorted air was some other Thing, an unknown. I watched it gesture, and the walking corpse moved further away from it.

I then realised that it wasn't trying to escape the stalkers. Either it was being controlled by the cloaked Thing, or it was trying to escape it.

I beeped my horn to catch the people's attention. I pointed to the shimmer. 'This one!' I said.

'What do you mean?' Janey said. 'There's nothing ... there ...'

I squinted, and I could make out an outline of the Thing. The more I focused, the clearer the image until I pierced the cloak and could see the Thing as she was.

And it was a different kind of monster. Living, cloaked, but somehow casting threads of some sort of energy over the shuffler.

I backed up and shone the light. This had the effect of revealing the cloaked person. I beeped my horn again, and leaned out of the window.

'You! What are you doing?'

The creature dropped her cloak. The creature's stalkers gasped. They then focused their eyes, squinting as I did.

'You're doing something with that ... thing,' I said. 'Who are you, and what do you want with it?'

The breather smiled, a sick grin. 'I'm taking it in for study,' she said. 'So many of these pretty things have been popping up since the Hot Days. Haven't you been paying attention?'

'Can't say that I have,' I replied. 'I'm new at the job.'

'Oh? When did you Awaken?'

'Half past eight,' I replied. 'I overslept. What's it got to do with you?'

The Thing frowned. I noticed how much it looked like a redheaded woman, maybe in her early Twenties, though by her mannerisms she could well have been a lot older. 'You're not like us,' she said. 'You're a Sleeper. How are you able to look through my -'

There was a clang. She fell forwards. Janey had hit her with the back of a frying pan. I looked at Janey, who shrugged. 'It's the only thing I had to hand,' she said. 'There's a big sale on kitchen appliances to beat the Christmas rush in the store. Last minute Christmas presents.'

I looked at the pan. 'I can't see many marriages lasting if the husband's so desperate that he has to buy a frying pan for Christmas,' I replied.

Again, Janey shrugged. 'It happens,' she replied. 'Imagine the poor bugger who's reduced to buying our cut price kitchen degreaser.'

'I imagine that would put a crimp in his marriage -' I said.

The shuffler launched itself towards the group, its hands reaching towards the nearest person, whom I knew as a young lad called Tony. Red hair, green eyes. Couldn't have been more than about seventeen.

'Oi, STOP!' The words just seemed to flow out of me. The creature's clawed fingers seemed to skitter away from Tony, as if they had struck a barrier of glass.

'What the hell?' I muttered. The shuffler paused, staggering back for a moment: then it began to lurch forward again -'

'That's quite enough,' I said. 'Freeze!'

Something in my words seemed to catch it, hold it suspended in place, unable to move far from the spot where it was rooted.

My head began pounding. Something was struggling behind my eyes, and it felt like someone trying to pull my brain out of my head. 'Hurry,' I groaned. 'Whatever you were going to do, bloody do it now!'

And that's when Tony did something terrifying.

The young lad bent over and coughed, as if puking up phlegm. He retched. Some sort of black liquid began to pour out of him, like motor oil. It evaporated, expanding into a swirling black cloud, which hung in the air, not moving despite the breeze. Tony stood, cupped his hands, and thrust at the shuffler. Where the black cloud touched its dead flesh, the body began to decay at a vastly accelerated rate. It did not scream - it did not seem to have any vocal chords - but as we watched, the shuffler decomposed into unidentifiable mulch in a matter of seconds.

Tony looked at me, and glanced at the unconscious ... magician? Witch? No, not a witch. Wiccans were kind, loving people who worshipped the earth and life. This one felt like someone who'd made pacts with some entity and had learned to manipulate the dead, animating rotting dead tissues and bringing them to life.

'Her, too,' I said. 'What she is, is just as bad as whatever that other thing was.'

Reluctantly, Tony gestured, and the cloud swept over the manipulator's cruel, yet unconscious, body. We watched the cloud erode away at her, the youthful looks draining away as her suspended ageing resumed at a terrible pace, like that scene at the end of the third Indiana Jones movie. Pretty soon, she too was just a pile of mouldering compost on the tarmac.

Tony groaned and bent over. The cloud vanished. The others helped him stand up. I looked at them all.

'Are you supposed to be on duty here tonight, Janey?' I asked.

Janey shook her head. 'I just popped by here to get some milk,' she replied. 'It was dark. No sign of Frank or Jacob. And I can't raise the boss, either.'

'When did you see the shuffler?' I asked.

Tony wheezed. 'Soon as I came here,' he said, 'I knew something was wrong with that guy.' He pointed to the decomposed remains of the shuffler. 'It's weird, but it looked like a ghost, riding a corpse ... that was not its own. Does that make sense?'

'I can't even begin to guess, Tony,' I replied. 'Until I came here, the only thing I had to worry about was getting a turkey from Tesco's in Frodsham Street, and maybe debating about going back to the family home in Yorkshire instead.' I shuddered. 'I'd rather not.'

Janey looked at the brightly-lit store, with its door wide open and nobody at the till. 'I think I need to go and get something from the office at the back,' she said. 'Security videos. They would have recorded everything.' She went back into the store.

'Which means the cops could identify us,' one of the other people in the group said. I didn't know this one. He looked like a guy who lived off the street. 'And I'd rather not get picked up by them, thanks.'

'Understandable,' I replied. 'All of you, hop in. You too, Tony. I'll just go in and help Janey to ...'

Janey emerged from the store, her face pale. She was clutching the videos to her chest. She looked at me. 'Greg,' she said, glancing back, 'I know where Frank and Jacob are.'

'Show me,' I said. She handed the tapes to Tony and the street guy, and I followed her into the store.

The shuffler, or maybe the puppeteer, had done a number on Frank and Jacob. Mangled and torn, lying on the floor of the security office. Those poor bloody innocents, they would not even have known what had killed them.

'I wonder if Tony can do that trick again,' I said, looking at the corpses. 'Just in case they get up or something.'

'Get up?' Janey scoffed. 'Corpses don't ...' Her jaw set when she realised that they apparently did, now.

'Whatever it was he regurgitated,' I said, 'it wrecked him inside. I hope he's got enough strength for another dose.'

'No need,' said a voice in the doorway. I turned to look at the street guy.

'Tony and I are of like mind,' he said. 'He isn't the only one to know this trick.' And with that, he too belched a cloud of vapour which filled the room. This one felt different: more like a burning smoke, with embers and ashes, but not a sulphurous smell. More like carbonisation. The effect on the corpses was the same - it decomposed them to mulch.

'Careful not to track any of it out,' I replied, when it was all over. 'Come on. Let's get to the car and let's get out of here.'

Janey insisted on writing a note and sticking it to the inside of the glass door, before turning off the lights, setting the alarm and locking up. I looked at the note. It read "Closed For Foreseeable Future Due To Unforeseen Circumstances."

She looked at me. 'Least I could do,' she said.

We went to the car, and I resumed my course home, with Janey, Tony and the two strangers in the car. I think we needed to ask some questions. The problem was, who the hell was there to turn to to explain what happened? What we just saw? What we just did?

**Author's Note:**

> If you're unfamiliar with Hunter: the Reckoning, it was a tabletop roleplaying game which launched in 1999, with the unusual premise of pitting ordinary people against a world infested with all manner of supernatural beings. These creatures, ranging from vampires, werewolves, mages and fairies to ghosts and walking undead, passed among the normal people of the world unnoticed. Perhaps the people did not want to notice, and chose not to notice.
> 
> The imbued hunters had that choice taken by them.
> 
> Beginning not long after July 20, 1999, ordinary people, from CEOs to sex workers and street people, found themselves able to see the undead and the monsters. They were real, they walked among us, and some unknown force was directing these ordinary people to act somehow, to save human lives in the short term. Nobody could guess how this imbuing was happening, whether or not there was some force or agency behind it happening, and what the long term goals were, if any. Most hunters back in 1999 knew only that they had been selected to hunt. They could feel the need to hunt, to confront these strange creatures infiltrating humanity, and all that they knew was that they had to hunt. They had no idea what, or even why.
> 
> They were given bizarre powers, too, which became known as edges; and they could activate Second Sight and a psychic screen capable of blocking practically any kind of supernatural interference or power. And even when using their powers, for the most part the imbued remained as fragile and as mortal as ever, never registering as anything but human to the monsters' arcane senses.
> 
> At first, nobody had a clue what was going on, and nobody to talk to. How could there be anyone? It's not as if monster hunting was something you could apply for through the Job Centre. The movement to organise the hunters, in the form of the hunter-net.org website, did not begin until later in 1999, when Witness1 put together his first little Beowulf cluster of computers, as some force managed to secure the website's presence on the internet, unnoticed by the domain registration authorities.
> 
> The Libra Chronicle is the story of Gregory Malpas Stewart, a man with a chequered past forced into a world which made his oldlife seem like a family trip to the Center Parcs resort by comparison. 
> 
> At the end of 1999, the then White Wolf created a fake website, anonymous-liberty.com, and set it up as a front for the hunters. If you signed up, you were actually invited to join a mailing list on White Wolf's own servers, a hunter-net for real just like the one which featured throughout the series. This was where I, the author, originally wrote Gregory Malpas Stewart's stories, telling them among the other fans writing their third-person and in-character fanfics and chronicles, until the website was taken down along with the entire mailing list archive, and all that fiction erased without a backup.
> 
> We all thought the backup would be on The Wayback Machine. We were wrong.
> 
> Despite my best efforts, all of my early Hunter: the Reckoning fic has been lost to me. Five years' worth of writing has gone, including some very human stories of personal sacrifice, grief, and loss. The old hunter-net.org website had honed my writing skills, something which would stand me in good stead; but until now, the twentieth anniversary year of Hunter: the Reckoning, I'd never felt compelled to write up his adventures.
> 
> The original Libra Chronicle is gone. This is a gritty reboot, redolent with nostalgia for the old game. Relive the joy of discovering Hunter: the Reckoning with me, as if you'd just picked up the core rulebook with its themes of fire and shotgun shells, for the very first time.


End file.
